The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
Stirred by Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, excitement for virtual reality (VR) has been growing rapidly. Many see virtual reality as the next major computing platform that will come after mobile, with uses in applications such as movies and television, architecture, and telepresence. Yet content availability is a clear hurdle for mass mainstream adoption of the futuristic technology. On the one hand, without sufficient VR content, consumers lack motivation to purchase VR headsets or VR-capable personal computing devices that are certain to cost a considerable sum; on the other hand, without a significant VR user base, content producers such as game makers are reluctant to invest significant resources into VR content production. Without compelling content or a staunch fan base, even dramatic advances in VR technology such as are happening today would not attract enough demand to match the supply of ever more VR hardware into the market.
Current trends for virtual reality content production evolve around ground-up development of virtual reality movies, news, sporting events, and video games. Within the physical world, action cameras and camera arrays are used to film live events for presentation in a virtual reality environment such as with a professional VR headset or with 360-degree video playback in slidable panorama mode on a conventional video viewing device. Within the gaming universe, developing VR games ground-up is inherently nontrivial, yet converting existing games into their VR counterparts is by no means less challenging. While influential games such as Minecraft are expected to be VR-supported before long, it would be years until most other desktop, mobile, or console games with less fanatic supporters become VR compatible.
An alternative to explicit VR game development is to record regular game play for VR replay instead. Screen recording applications and platforms such as Kamcord and EveryPlay have existed for desktop and mobile games. However, these screencast services record the device screen only, not the entire 360-degree environment. No known solution exists to convert screencast recordings into spherical media for VR replay, or to render and record in 360 degrees directly within a 3D game. On the other hand, production-ready offline rendering systems are available to render 360 stereoscopic panorama movie image sequences compatible with VR headsets. Nonetheless, such systems are generally offline tools for demo generation by game developers only, and are incapable of real-time capture during game play. More importantly, these systems are not intended for low-end platforms or user devices, as rendering and compressing stereo VR panorama images at the size of several hundred megapixels necessitate high processing power and careful memory management and optimization.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to make it easy for game developers and players to capture and record existing video games in real-time, and replay, stream, or even live-play in a virtual reality environment.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.